Deliveries, discounts, even a self-isolation cheese and wine kit. The sector is delivering a masterclass in adaptability
Financially, it is a sticking plaster. A non-profit way, as one restaurant operator put it to me – as he hurriedly tried to set up a delivery kitchen in a suburban rugby club – of generating some cashflow to cover staff wages and lay off as few people as possible. Nonetheless, the manner in which so many British food and drink businesses have reinvented themselves in the last week, as Friday’s eventual formal shutdown became an inevitability, has been an incredible feat of energy and ingenuity.
Bars and restaurants are now takeaways, bottle shops, delicatessens. Others are selling hampers, fresh meal-kits or offering cookery courses. In West Yorkshire, the Moorcock, previously known for envelope-pushing new-Nordic cuisine, is launching a wood-fired pizza and ice-cream takeaway. There is now a gin’n’beer drive-through in Salford, a sentence I’ve been waiting all my life to write. In London, Cheese Bar’s truck is delivering the ultimate in middle-class outreach: “self-isolation survival kits” of cheese and wine.
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Related: Coronavirus has exposed a desperate need for localism | Simon Jenkins
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